In the following excerpts, Walter Benjamin explores the simple activities of childhood in order to find paradimactic instances of dialectic thinking and aesthetic theory. Thus reflections on childhood reveal naïve and intuitive moments of complex conceptual operations that are later lost to adults stuck in a one-dimensional world of production and consumption. An autobiography of childhood is not reducible to a series of Oedipal dramas that haunt the conscious self. The archeology of memory is first and foremost a methodology for philosophical thinking through which philosophy and experience reunite in the figure of the child at play in his or her surroundings. While not supplying us with a full philosophy of childhood, Benjamin nevertheless presents the reader with a complex constellation of images which suggest, when read together, that childhood—mediated through the intellectual activity and experience of the adult—is a potent resource for philosophical practice. In the phenomenology of childhood—in the seemingly inconsequential and smallest details of childlike play—the very idea of the world is to once again be rekindled for the adult. Thus these images excavated from Benjamin’s memory, ripped from their original context by the passing of historical time, become integrated into a new constellation of meanings through the process of autobiographical reflection.

This essay compares the philosophical thoughts on happiness put forth in poems by Friedrich Nietzsche at the age of 12-13 with the happiness concept of Frederik, a modern secondary school student, at about the same age, who was inspired by three of Nietzsche’s poems to consider his own ideas on happiness. The intent is to demonstrate that the child Nietzsche’s poems, written to confront his life problems through philosophizing, can also be useful to 21st-century children, encouraging them to think about problematic and serious fundamental life questions. That this is beneficial has been demonstrated not only by Daniela Camhy in the American and Austrian language areas, but also by Hermann Josef Schmidt in his Quadrology written about Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s childhood and youth.

This paper finds its inspiration in the work of the seventeenth century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza. My objective is to briefly examine three crucial aspects of Spinoza’s philosophy which are not only extremely useful to our understanding of philosophy for children but also inspirational as they challenge some of our ingrained modes of thinking and create space for new relations with knowledge, others and the self. Firstly, Spinoza’s relational ontology allows us to perceive ourselves as moments in a process of integration. In his philosophy, the understanding of connectedness is crucial to the expansion of our powers or activity. I thus suggest that the collective practice of philosophy can contribute to the enhancement of rational systems of sociability in which the understanding of connectedness is crucial. Secondly, reason and affectivity are not separate in Spinoza’s philosophy. Our power to think and affect is directly associated with our power to be affected or our openness to others. These first two aspects are also directly associated with his ethical and political project. Since, for Spinoza, joy is the passage from a lesser to a greater power to act, and virtue is equated with activity, I argue that the collective practice of philosophy can be understood in this perspective as essentially joyful, in a political and ethical sense: it increases one’s powers through the increase of power also experienced by others.

Deleuze and Guattari affirm in a Thousand Plateaus that children's questions are mis-understood if they are not comprehended as question-machines (Mil Platôs, 1997, p. 42). Question-machines are understood as questions that uncoil in problems and that pursue a fundamental question that is not resolved and that remains throughout all answers. What can we do with the question-machines that children make? Do we answer them? Do we use them to proliferate more questions in philosophical dialogues? How can we use group dialogues to generate other possibilities of thinking? Should we drive students to a solitary space, as suggested by Deleuze´s example of the professor of the Abecedaire in the letter “p”, instead of just promoting other dialogues? One who knows and speaks too much impedes thought instead of promoting it because many times continuous speaking, without pauses, without interruptions, without the silences that summon something new, prevent something that in the end is worth saying. How can we guarantee then, in a philosophy class with children, moments other than just conversations; moments that promote different opportunities of expression, of thought, of problematizing?

Homo videns is today’s man or woman whose knowledge-frames are shaped by the use of modern media. The passive experience (from childhood on) of an overwhelmingly image-based media can prevent children from developing a capacity for abstraction--that is, the ability to form general concepts, to make comparisons, and to acknowledge different points of view. What is at stake is the future of democracy as a form of life that rests on rational discussion and argumentative skills. Philosophy for Children offers an effective means to counter this phenomenon. If homo videns is (or risks being) overwhelmed by the immediacy of the medium and narcotized by ‘un-reflection’ like a prisoner in Plato’s cave, children and adolescents who participate in the discourses of Philosophy for Children have the opportunity to experiment with thinking, to have first-hand experience in the co-construction of knowledge, and thereby to become citizens of a real and effective democracy.

This paper compares the concepts of Japanese and German primary school children as they relate to the “ethics of care.” To do this we have used the research methodology of expanding and replicating an experiment to test whether the results can be interculturally confirmed. In our design we replicated the experiment in children’s philosophy on the question “What are Family Ties?” carried out by Toshiaki Ôse in September 2002 with the 5th grade of the municipal .primary school Hamanogô in Chigasaki.

This paper discusses some major similarities and differences between community of philosophical inquiry (CPI) and community of mathematical inquiry (CMI), and offers a few examples of the implementation of CMI in the context of a school mathematics classroom. Three modes of CMI are suggested. The first mode facilitates inquiry into mathematical problems - that is, it provides a medium for “doing and talking mathematics.” In this case, CMI is primarily an avenue for problem solving—defining problems, interpreting them, working with different methods to solve them, reflecting on suggested alternative methods, verifying solutions, and drawing conclusions. The second mode leads us to “talk about mathematics” through collaborative inquiry into mathematical concepts such as axioms, theorems, algorithms, infinity, and the posing of philosophical questions that concern mathematics as a system--particular structures and rules and their relation to human experience. The third mode makes use of CMI for meta-inquiry into our collective experience in “doing and talking mathematics” and “talking about mathematics,” and may be characterized as “talking about doing mathematics.”

This study attempts to describe and analyze the question of teacher formation in Philosophy for Children by focusing on two central principles: the first is that we defend the introduction of philosophy into elementary schools; the second that we place greater emphasis on current programs of teacher formation in the field. We begin the article by analyzing the work and research of the creator and pioneer of the program Philosophy for Children, Matthew Lipman. The article proceeds to inquire into and describe the teacher formation efforts in the field in Brasil, mainly those of the Brasilian Center of Philosophy for Children (CBFC) and some alternative efforts coordinated by Walter Kohan and Paula Ramos de Oliveira. A general overview of teacher formation and the teaching profession in Brasil is also conducted. The theoretical base, from which we analyze the concept of formation, is built on the Frankfurt School, particularly Theodor W. Adorno’s texts on education, formation, and semi-formation.